Video Card Hell

For the last few days, I’ve been trapped in Video Card Hell.

I decided on Friday that I really needed a better video card, so I bought an ASUS AGP-V7700 GeForce2 GTS Deluxe. When I installed it, I immediately started having problems: the BIOS display was filled with weird blinking white dots, and Win2k would crash before it got past the loading screen. After lots of testing, I found that the card would do this regardless of which computer I put it in, so the only thing I could think of was a corrupted BIOS on the card itself.

Saturday, I took the card back to Alabama Computer Associates, and they happily swapped it for another card. This card installed easily enough, but within two minutes of playing Unreal Tournament, the whole machine would freeze. So, again, more testing. And more testing.

Almost to the point of taking the second card back, I found an interesting thread on AMDMB.com. Apparently there is a known bug with Win2k and the VIA chipset, so I applied the patch, and afterwards was able to play UT and other games with no problems. I’m still having an occasional crash, but according to this thread, it could be a ram issue. I have no idea whether my current ram is AMD-compatible, but it’s next on the list for replacement.